He Saw The Best In Me

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I often wonder what God sees when God looks on me. Does God see what I see? Does God agree or disagree with the image I strain against? Does God see something completely different?

I have lived a life wondering what others see when they see me….wondering if they even see me at all. It had gotten so bad–this struggle to ascertain the view of me from other eyes–that at one point, I wrote myself off before anybody else could. I had perceived an abjectness that surrounding a complete void in who I was, a false projection of normality that I used to fuction in a world that still sniffed out my complete falseness.

As I approach the cross this week, our celebration of total sacrifice–of choice and then of life–that Christ endured on behalf of a world not always willing to be the love He embodied, I am reflecting again on that question that has plagued me my whole life: what does God see when God looks at me?

If you were to believe religion, God sees filth. God sees complete disregard of God’s completeness and holiness. God sees a thing utterly unworthy of trying to salvage, as they say in the church a wretch undone. There’s something so disheartening in that theology. How can one then be redeemed, if one is utterly destroyed? Where is the hope? Where is the reason behind the sacrifice in which we revel year after year, a hodge podge of bunnies and old Pre-Christian religions and ceremonies steeped in Jewish tradition?

It makes no sense.

And so I cling to logic as much as logic can be applied to a belief system so illogical: I believe that God sees the best in me. That even as God knew how we would at turns falter and fall deliberately away, God’s love has remained eternal, God’s view of me being one steeped in goodness and mercy. I choose to now cling desperately to the understanding that as Jesus walked into torture and ridicule and death, that He saw my face–saw my need, saw my heart, saw my stumbling ways and took one of those steps, one of those nails with my name in His bleeding, crying mouth. That Jesus saw the trajectory of my life and God impressed into His pain my life and my one shot at more than a distant understanding of God. He saw me walking in the light of God’s presence.

And I choose to believe that God implanted me in Jesus’s blood, so that each time God looks at me, God sees the love that made Christ keep going when He could have turned away.

I pray that you, too, can sit in that belief with me–that God looks at you and sees everlasting love.